Having walked briskly to the station and arrived in good time, I boarded my train at Chynów and found myself a window seat. I look out over an impeccably gorgeous day. The sky is crystalline and cloudless from horizon to horizon, trees in full leaf, magnificently green. The 07:33 train to Warsaw draws into the platform on time; all is good. Indeed, it's not just all good – it's perfect.
As I sit down, I behold the empty expanse to the west of the railway line, where the goods yard used to be, beyond it trees among which farmhouses nestle. I feel like I've just settled back comfortably into a stream of consciousness temporarily interrupted by the action of boarding the train – it's familiar and pleasant... now, where was I?
PAFF! That was it! That exomnesia moment, which I identify as being from beyond this biological lifetime. Recognisably another place, another time – not the here-and-now. Qualia from elsewhere.
I search for more, but that moment, that precise feeling, evaporates within a fraction of a second. It leaves a haunting, beautiful aftertaste. I want to hang on to the moment, extend it, grasp it, revel in it, understand it – yet it is ephemeral; it is not to be. (Is it not meant to be?) This moment did not have the quality of a thought, it was a quantum of consciousness, a discrete unit of experience, clearly anomalous, yet entirely familiar; I have had many of those over the course of my life. What brings them on? Why do they occur – is there a purpose behind this phenomenon? Why do they feel so familiar and pleasant? Why don't other human beings report such experiences?
Qualia, units of experience, befall us in the here-and-now. They return to our consciousness, bidden or unbidden, triggered or spontaneously, like Wordsworth's Daffodils. ["When oft upon my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon my inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude"]. What I'm talking about here is an anomalous qualia memory, in which that moment re-experienced is not from this lifetime.
I consider the physical aspects of what has just occurred. Is it a combination on my brain of the effects of brisk biological activity (hurrying to the station) and sense of relief (anxiety lifts, I've caught my train, it's on time, it's not crowded)? Is it the strong sunlight, streaming in from east, triggering greater neuronal activity? Is it just the aesthetic pleasure of being? Do the eight grams of caffeine in my morning coffee, drunk less than an hour earlier, have any influence?
Over the next two days, I'd have three more such anomalous experiences, less intense but entirely congruent with each other in how they felt, two more on board the train, one into town and one back home again, and one while on a morning walk, glancing down at the dry earth between the weeds and my suede desert boots kicking up dust. The strong sunlight, morning and evening seems to be a common thread.
The flashbacks – they are like cracks in spacetime that allow in a simulacrum of a conscious experience that occurred in the past, experienced in the present,as though it were in the present (that specious present, that one-tenth of a second). Past and present merge for an instant, then part company again. And as they do so, qualitatively I have tasted reality. As real as it gets.
So, here it is; if I have a life's quest, it is to get a closer understanding of what's happening here. As with the hard problem of consciousness, is this a physical or spiritual phenomenon? Or both? Is this an intimation that conscious life extends beyond biological life – that our bodies are but containers for an eternal awareness? And if so, is there a mechanism at work here?
My search must above all be intellectual honest, whittling away wishful thinking or other forms of cognitive bias. I cannot deny that I often experience such exomnesia moments. This is something more profound than the anemoia, a word concocted by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows explained here.
I can say that I experience these exomnesia moments more frequently in Poland than in Britain, and more frequently in Chynów than in Warsaw. Is this because of a continental climate that feels more 'past-life' familiar? I notice these moments occurring more frequently happening as seasons change, or as one spell of settled weather gives way to another? Or is climate change making Mazovia's climate more like that my spirit experienced in a previous incarnation? And then there is the role of the sun; Mazovia receives about 18% more direct sunlight than does London. Do the rays of the sun unfiltered by cloud cover stimulate the brain to process thought differently? Could this be the effect of relic neutrinos? Or am I getting exomnesia moments more frequently as I age?
"All was before
All will repeat again,
And only that moment of recognition
Brings us joy."
- Osip Mandelstam
As always, more questions than answers.
UPDATE 19 MAY: Walking through the forest alongside the railway line between Chynów and Krężel stations, I have another exomnesia flashback moment; again, strongly familiar and pleasant. Again, America, mid-1950s; a prosperous suburbia, evening, getting ready to go out and meet friends.
This time last year:
Ego – self-consciousness – pure consciousness
This time five years ago:
The Day the Forecasters Got It Wrong
This time six years ago:
Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time
This time ten years ago:
W-wa Wola became W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 two years ago today
This time 11 years ago:
From yellow to white - dandelions go to seed
This time 12 years ago:
The good topiarist
This time 14 years ago:
Wettest. May. Ever.
This time 16 years ago:
Blackpool-in-the-Tatras
[My last visit to Zakopane – I've not been back since]
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